THE SPECTRUM BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE

bert stern

The windows after sunset are black. It is an odd feeling to look up from the monitor to the window and see black after seeing white all day. I look at the window and return to the monitor snow-blinded for awhile. The windows are white or black these days of snow on the ground. This is the only way I can see dividing the whole spectrum of life into white or black. Day with snow on the ground and night. Another reason I must withdraw my mind from politicians is the way they divide everything into black and white, not only racially, going with the polar opposites, ignoring the spectrum of life in between. It is between the poles we live, not at one end or the other. It is in good writing I see the spectrum between, which turns my attention to everyday life where I never see anyone who is completely good or completely bad. The good are probably dead. It's said the good die young. I don't believe it, but it's fun to use for the humor. I know one man who is 103 and would be at the top of my list of people I could say I've known who can be called good. Also knew a woman who lived up into her nineties, was bad unto making it easy to think her evil. I think we all know a few people we'd call bad unto evil who are not in prison, except the prison of their own minds. And we all know some people we'd call good according to our individual ideas of what it means to be good. I don't think of good a chalk line to walk without sin. I think of it more as an attitude toward life. 

bert stern

Somebody whose attitude toward life has compassion in it tends to be somebody we call a good person. Somebody whose attitude toward life has compassion absent turns out to be somebody we might call bad. We all know somebody we believe has no conscience. People without conscience tend to end up behind bars, get killed, or just fade from the picture, while people without compassion thrive in this phenomenal world, or seem to. The old hymn, Farther Along, plays in my head. Farther along, we'll know all about it, farther along, we'll understand why, cheer up my brother, live in the sunshine, we'll understand it all by and by. One of the things I love in this life is sitting in a hillbilly old-time religion church with everybody singing this song in their slow, one word at a time way. I think way down deep it's the lack of compassion in the world of making money that I have a hard time living with. In the early 1970s I read a book, Small is Beautiful, that rang my bells. If I were to go back and read it now, I have an idea I'd find I have lived its principles. I want to maintain my spot on the earth's surface I have dominion over with integrity unto the ground itself. I want my ground to be rich in trees and topsoil. I don't want to use it to make money, like lease it to pumpkin growers, or Christmas tree growers or any of the other possibilities that poison the land and the ground water. I can't help it that the ground water has been poisoned at the source, but I don't have to add to it. 

bert stern

My little spot that Spring Lizard Creek runs through, I've allowed my land to be itself. I've only made more money than I needed to get by on, living frugally, a few times. They didn't last long, just enough to catch up from falling behind. Some years ago I came to see the importance of living the way I want the world to be. I can't change the whole world. But it is my world that I live in, the community, the people I know, neighbors, my spot I pay taxes on. I don't live in LA, NY or DC. Those places are somebody else's concerns, not mine. I'm all the time hearing somebody start a sentence, "The world would be a better place if everybody would (fill in the blank)." The only thing everybody is going to do is ingest, evacuate and expire. So the whole world is not going to do any one thing. I can't change or benefit anything beyond my own small world I interact inside. In my own world, at home, here in the house, inside my head I have a degree of control. If I live the principles I believe the rest of the world would benefit from, then my world benefits. If I believe compassion would benefit the world, then I can regard the people and wildlife of my world with compassion and see if it does or does not. I've tried it. It does benefit. It benefits all concerned. My world turns into a better place. Out there in the flatland and across the sea is other people's worlds. Mine is here where I live. If I lived in NYC, there, too, my world would be the people I know, the people I interact with. If I treat the people in my world right, they treat me right. It comes down to how I want to be treated by the people around me. I regard them with respect and respect comes my way too. 

bert stern

Live the changes I want to see in the world, and my world becomes the way I want the world to be. I've found a good place where my world is the way I want it to be. My interactions with the people I know are friendly without suspicion, open to who the other is, and my world has become a world I enjoy living in every day. I've committed to the path of love, which is not a matter of pink teddy bears. Regarding the people around me with basic human respect is an act of love. Taking hay to the donkeys in the morning is an act of love. Lending a hand to somebody who needs an assist is an act of love. It doesn't need to be noticeable as such. It's the motivation in the heart, where it comes from that matters. Like in old-time hillbilly singing and music making, it must be from the heart or it's not music. If what I say in conversation comes from the heart and what I do comes from the heart, I've made my world a better place as I speak and as I do. Inside myself it's a very big deal. Outside self it may be a ripple, and that's ok. It doesn't even need to be a ripple. It doesn't need to be anything outside myself. When my attitude toward life says everybody around me is good people, then they are. If my attitude toward life were to say everybody around me sucks, then they do. And they get the blame. In my world is no television, except in the houses of everybody I know. I avoid everything on tv as corporate misinformation, deception its purpose. One of my rules of thumb is don't eat anything advertised on tv (except pizza). I don't want a new car and don't want the latest shaving equipment. I don't like being told with pants on fire urgency I need to buy something I don't want. Absence of television is automatic quiet and peace in my world.   

bert stern himself

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A RAINBOW OF DUALITY

I've recently discovered a new name for myself. It is ODD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Get pushed into a corner and come out fighting: Disorder. It's about people who don't take well to authoritarian behavior. That it is called a disorder does not allow for the fact that many authoritarian figures don't know what they're about, don't make rational decisions, and look down on the people they have authority over. Authoritarian is a disorder, too, if oppositional defiance is a disorder. I can't help but think that the science of psychology has so far worked against us humans. After a century and a half of psychology as a science, psychoanalysis is prohibitively expensive but for the upper middle class. The part that applies to the rest of us is manipulation by marketing and political manipulation. Collectively, we are manipulated by a field of study sought initially to be to our benefit that has turned against us. Given that these sorts of manipulation amount to authority, my own ODD comes  into play and I oppose  the manipulation. I can't fight it. It would be like fighting the wind. I can't control it, can't even manipulate it in turn, can't even talk about it without somebody calling me a cynic, which I have no problem with. Online dictionary gives it two meanings. One is Greek philosophy that virtue is the only good and its essence lies in self-control and independence. I have no argument with that, looking at virtue as spontaneous instead of structured. Two is believing human conduct is motivated by self-interest. I have no argument with that either. Our popular use of the word, cynic, tends to mean somebody not optimistic. Remember Dr Bernie Siegel, pediatric surgeon who wrote feel-good self-help books ten to twenty years ago? In an interview, I heard him say, "Pessimists are right, but optimists live longer."

 

 

 

 

 

I've questioned it ever since I heard him say it. It's one of those generalizations that begs exception. In a plane crash, optimists go down with pessimists. When an American bomb blows up an Iraqi or Afghani neighborhood, optimists die with pessimists, at the same time. Is he talking about laboratory conditions? Out here in the world, not all circumstances are self made. Earthquakes, for example. In an apartment building that collapses from a quake, pessimists die with optimists. It's obviously not a statement meant to be analyzed. Hear it, agree, be impressed by its cleverness, take it as a saying from on high, an authority, one who knows more than you do. I remember hearing it, thinking it insightful, like men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then questioning it immediately, impatient with myself for questioning the obvious. But it's not obvious. Maybe by empirical study it would bear out. But I don't know how such a study could be controlled, considering the unforeseen is around every corner. People who don't smoke get lung cancer. Some people who are crazy drivers have wreck after wreck and survive, while some have one wreck and die. I know a guy who went through the windshield of his car and woke up on the hood unhurt. Another I know drove into a tree dead center front bumper 70 mph without seatbelt and survived. The air bag knocked him out. He woke up lying down in the seat, otherwise unhurt, holding the gear shift in his hand, it separated from the transmission. I don't think they survived because they were optimists. The first one was so drunk he probably couldn't see. He flowed like a fish through seaweed. The second one was racing. I wouldn't say either one was optimist or pessimist, just working class guys bored with labor jobs that have no fun in them and home life that has no fun. It's called: I'm the only hell my mother ever raised.

 

 

 

 

 

My other question is how somebody of Siegel's extensive knowledge would see it so either/or. People who would be categorized optimist have some pessimist in them. Pessimists have some optimist in them. All in varying degrees according to DNA, sun, moon and planets, experience. The more I think about it, the more they bleed together such that it is not one or the other, but interwoven degrees of both. Either/or makes it easier for our minds to grasp thin air. It acknowledges duality to see opposite poles. Yet, there is darkness in the light and light in the darkness. In this world, there is no absolute good and no absolute bad. Get down to defining these opposites and it starts getting fuzzy. The woman who loves her abusive man because she understands why he's bad. He aint all bad and she aint all good. Getting down to what we mean by good and bad gets subjective in a hurry. When our karmic return on a given action is to our liking, we call the action good. When the return is not to our liking, we call it bad. An individual's liking varies from person to person. People who like arguing take arguing for the good. People who don't like it take it for the bad. People who like heroin take it for the good and the people who don't like it take it for the bad. Objectively, we may say heroin is bad because it is self-destructive. So is everything else we do, though heroin self-destructs in the fast lane. From what I understand, "when I'm rushin and on my run, you know I feel just like I'm Jesus' son." That's from Lou Reed's song, Heroin. The people who use heroin evidently think it's to the good. They'll debase themselves to the gutter for it. That's unconditional love, giving it all you've got, giving it your life. However, we can make the objective call fairly convincingly after the good in a heroin rush wears off and what you're left with is infinite craving, wanting to crawl out of your skin. That's what we call the bad. Then go back for more of the good, which leaves you again with the bad, round and round, duality, the nature of this world.  

 

 

 

 

 

I've made a turn in my life away from the political because I see it's all about the poles of good or bad, rich or poor, black or white, reduced to extremes of duality, which makes a very unreal world. It is said that it is shades of gray between black and white, but I say all the colors are between black and white. In paint, white is absence of colors, black is all the colors. Everything in between is the rainbow of colors. In light it's just the reverse, black is the absence of light and white is all the colors, illuminated by way of prism. I've realized recently I'm giving an awful lot of attention to ignorant professional politicians, the lowest grade of human being. I see their faces over and over every day, feeling revulsion. Finally, I asked myself why I want to focus so much attention on these people who don't think about me, don't give a shit about me, not even the remotest shit. The only thing they want to do with me is get my money. Why do I pay attention to them? Why am I not paying attention to artists, poets, writers I love reading, more than I have time to read in a lifetime. Good movies, art projects, good reading. I have a good life. I don't need to have my head full of ignoramuses whose only purpose is money. These people are not even authorities in my world. They exist when I turn on NPR and BBC radio news or look at online news. They exist when I flip the On switch. It is totally by my own volition I am exposed to these people I personally have no respect for, people I would cross the street to avoid shaking hands with. It is time to relax further into my home on Waterfall Road, leave the vision of the poles of duality for the vision of my everyday life, the rainbow of duality. Along the way, I've seen the good in bad people and the bad in good people. The badest man and the badest woman I know, I see in both of them good people. I tend toward "bad" people, because they don't advertise the good in themselves. When it comes to good, the bad people have it all over the good people. And when it comes to bad, the good people can make the bad people look like beginners.    

 

 

 

 

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